I've been marketing books for years now, and while I'm pretty good at getting the word out, I'm not so good at "closing the sale." I'm thinking that my approach is too shallow, and that I need to #1 reach the people who are really interested in my books and #2 give them enough information to make them want to buy the book or recommend it to someone who will buy. Let's face it: much as we want to say online sales are the wave of the future, it's still the brick-and-mortar books that sell better, easier.
Of course, the more books I have out and the more genres I write in, the more difficult it gets to research and reach a target audience.
So, I'm starting a newsletter, as most of you know. (If you missed that, scroll down, please). But I'd love to hear your ideas as well.
What do you do to really get the word out about your books? How do you handle multiple genres?
2 comments:
This is from Sarah Reinhard (http://snoringscholar.com). For some reason, Blogger didn't post it:
You are onto something about wanting to reach the people who already love you, starting a conversation.
Best kind of marketing, especially in the world we're in where we're inundated with constant marketing messages is word-of-mouth, which is easy for me to say and hard for you to do, I know.
I think it's worth looking into (and you probably already have) how to tap into the people who love you across genre. I have read stuff of yours that's in a genre I don't ever read anymore (horror, anyone?), because I love YOUR writing. So how to reposition your scifi/fantasy stuff for the nonfiction folks and vice versa?
I haven't yet had to market my own books (coming soon though!), but I plan to do a series on my blog related to the titles as they come out. So for the Advent title, I'll do a series on Advent and then reference back to the book. That hinges on my readership and social networking cloud paying attention, though. But I think it's best to start with the people you're already connected to, your existing customers, as it were. They are already invested in you, for one thing, and they have a reason to buy. In fact, with large companies, it's well-known (but often little practiced) that it's far less expensive to KEEP a customer than it is to gain a new one. Applying that as an author means that we should tap into the people who are our big fans, the ones whose glowing reviews we're tempted to ignore, perhaps, but whose enthusiasm might be just the wind our little boats need to sail.
Anyway, if you have specific questions, I am no expert in the book world, but I do have a bit of a background in marketing and am happy to help you however I can.
And, with that, I must go get juice for a 3yo and pray my rosary. :)
Happy Saturday to you!
I think that's the scariest thing about being a writer these days--- that once you are done you are expected to do marketing. How many people are good at both writing and marketing?
Having this blog is a step in the correct marketing direction, though.
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